Patrick Collison, in his recent podcast with Dwarkesh Patel, suggests some smart ambitious young people would be better to stay away from Silicon Valley. The tech community values entrepreneurship, building things from scratch, and tends to devalue deep, domain specific knowledge. Some things, however, require years, if not decades of careful study before they’ll see material fruit.
Another way to frame this is that Silicon Valley has a short attention span. When everyone is chasing the next big thing, it can be hard to stay focused. It is apparent in VC attitudes, chasing the crypto, scooters, now AI. It is apparent in conversations, as people are fighting for the extra bit of twitter attention, or the invite to the latest party.
This model has proven tremendously successful for software startups, and software innovation. Momentum and growth, that are relatively easy to measure with revenue or daily active users, are strong metrics for the industries Silicon Valley excels at. Not only that, Silicon Valley has begun making strong progress in the world of atoms, with space, self-driving cars, climate tech, and materials science seeming to make progress.
However, given Silicon Valley’s global ambitions, further temperament is important. Silicon Valley’s impact on politics, for example, lags far behind their other successes. Only recently has Silicon Valley even begun to engage in local politics with GrowSF and Gary Tan. The impact of Silicon Valley on national politics is paltry, of course, large tech companies have effective lobbying arms, but the impact of Silicon Valley on the broader debate and specific policy far lags their cultural influence.
Metascience and YIMBYism both show a successful formula for institutional change. For Silicon Valley to embrace institutional change at the federal level, they can learn from those lessons. This means less of a focus on twitter dunks, and more on deep knowledge. For Silicon Valley to reach its potential, it needs to lengthen its attention span.
